Everything You Need to Know About the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Disaster

Update, Nov. 14: For a report out today, the Wall Street Journal interviewed engineers and a government official connected to Virgin Galactic who said that founder Richard Branson's ambitious timelines for flying SpaceShipTwo went against the recommendations of the technical team. The project was plagued by more problems than outsiders knew, according to the Journal, which said: "Without a firm design, there was no way to reliably predict when the first passengers would make it to space for more than $200,000 a ticket."

Update, Nov. 12: The NTSB released a statement today saying that investigators had interviewed surviving SpaceShipTwo pilot Pete Siebold. Siebold confirmed that he had been thrown clear of SpaceShipTwo as it broke up at high altitude, and that he had managed to unbuckle himself from his seat before his parachute deployed automatically at lower altitude. He said he did not remember co-pilot Mike Alsbury moving the lever that unlocked the ship's feather system.

The NTSB is now focusing its investigation of the crash on "the aerodynamic and inertial forces that acted on the vehicle" after SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine fired. It seems clear that it is those forces that ripped the craft apart after the feather deployed prematurely, spoiling the ship's optimal shape for rocketing through the atmosphere.

We still don't know why Alsbury unlocked the feather too early in the flight. One possibility is that faulty cockpit displays were somehow to blame. The NTSB team "continues to review available data for the vehicle's systems (flight controls, displays, environmental control, etc.)," according to today's statement. "The group is also reviewing design data for the feather system components and the systems safety documentation."

At 10:10 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo dropped from its mothership at an altitude of 45,000 feet over Mojave, Calif. and fired its single hybrid rocket engine for its fourth-ever powered flight. A few seconds into the burn, according to an eyewitness account, the craft experienced what Mojave Air and Space Port manager Stu Witt would later call "an in-flight anomaly."

Witt said at a press conference after the disaster that he didn't see an explosion and he didn't see anything abnormal in the rocket plume. He knew something was wrong only "when other things weren't happening," he said. "It wasn't because something did happen—it was what I was not hearing and not seeing. If there was a huge explosion, I didn't see it."

The ship apparently dropped out of the sky in silence, with its engine off, and crashed into the desert some 25 miles north of Mojave.

The two pilots on board were employees of Scaled Composites, the company that built SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. One of them managed to parachute to the ground. He was injured badly enough to require a helicopter evacuation to a nearby hospital.

The other pilot apparently died on impact, according to Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. He said in the press conference that he overflew the crash site shortly after the accident. "The aircraft is in several different pieces," he said. "We found one person who obviously was deceased immediately."

This test flight was the first for a new kind of fuel—a plastic similar to nylon. Previously, SpaceShipTwo had used a synthetic rubber fuel, one that had been giving giving engineers trouble for years as they tried to scale up the successful 3-seat SpaceShipOne prototype, which won the X Prize in 2004, to a much bigger vehicle using the same hybrid rocket design and fuel, and meant to carry tourists to suborbital space.

Scaled Composites president Kevin Mickey downplayed any role that the new fuel might have had in the crash. "We were flying a rocket motor today that had been thoroughly tested on the ground and had been through a qualification series, and of course we expected no anomalies with the motor today." He called the fuel a "small nuance to the rocket motor design."

SpaceShipTwo was supposed to be the ship that commercialized spaceflight in a big way, carrying six paying passengers at a time for a few minutes of weightless flight and a view of the curvature of the Earth set against the backdrop of space. Virgin Group chief Richard Branson, who financed construction of the ship, has said he would personally inaugurate service to space within the next few months.

The SpaceShipTwo that wrecked was a total loss. So, to recover from this severe setback will require building a new vehicle. Before that can happen, though, investigators will have to figure out exactly what went wrong. Mickey said that officials from the National Transportation Safety Board would arrive early Saturday morning to begin that job.

We're left to wonder what impact the accident will have on the nascent commercial spaceflight industry, which Branson has been working hard to characterize as safe. Friday's crash is a stark reminder that spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor.

Witt encouraged everyone working in the industry to keep moving forward despite the pain of losing a member of what he said described as the very small test community. "My message to them is, stay the course," he said. "This business is worthy business."

Update, Sunday, Nov. 2: The pilot who was killed in the SpaceShipTwo crash has been identified as Michael Alsbury, a 14-year veteran of Scaled Composites. He was the co-pilot of SpaceShipTwo for this test flight. Pilot Peter Siebold, who is Scaled Composites' director of flight operations (who also flew SpaceShipOne in 2004) managed to bail out and survived a parachute landing. He is undergoing treatment for his injuries. A statement from Scaled Composites released on Saturday said he was alert and able to talk to friends and his doctors.

Richard Branson said in a brief press conference in Mojave on Saturday that he and Virgin Galactic would not "push on blindly" with the SpaceShipTwo program. "To do so would be an insult to all those affected by this tragedy." He said the program would continue only if, after finding out what went wrong, "we can overcome it."

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators arrived on the scene early Saturday morning and got to work examining the crash site and cataloging the data available, including video from cameras on the spaceship, the WhiteKnightTwo mothership, and a chase plane, as well as telemetry, and radar info. They have begun interviewing engineers and flight controllers.

NTSB acting chairman Christopher Hart said in a press conference Saturday night that the crash debris covered an area of about five miles, which was consistent with an in-flight breakup. "When the debris field spans that large an area, then we know there was an in-flight separation," Hart said. "If it had crashed together then all the pieces would be close to each other. But that spread of the debris field tells us that it was an in-flight separation, and of course the question then is, why did that happen, so that's what we are exploring. That's what our investigators are examining."

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